TW: Pensions at the state level are just a disaster. This story uses New Jersey as the metaphor for the other states and they picked a good foil. NJ exhibits almost all of the challenges facing states:
1) Over-promising employees- this piece cannot be overemphasized. State and local governments bought electoral peace during stronger economic times by dishing out benefits which are unsustainable. This goes to heart of our demographic mess. It is easy to promise future benefits when you have a relatively young worker to retiree ratio, but when those ratios shift down all hell breaks loose fiscally. Government workers and their dependents are a significant electoral force. They always have been but when the demographics were more favorable pandering to this constituency (Daley machine!!!) was less harmful, now it is unsustainable. Keep in mind these are not only featherbedding parking attendents and street sweepers, this group includes prison guards, firemen, police, teachers etc. Who wants to vote against teachers, prisons, police and fire trucks? Well you might want to think about it.
2) Underfunding the pensions to begin with- NJ shows how policy decisions years ago create landmines decades into the future. NJ in mid and late 1990's started systematically under-funding their pensions via accounting tricks. The bag of tricks is just about empty.
3) Over-reliance on market returns- pension managers bought into the same BS, individuals did about the equity markets going up double digits into eternity. Hence, they shifted increasing amounts of the fund into equities frequently right into the teeth of bear markets. On top of this I suspect the arrangements by which many pension managers pushed funds to particular investment houses were less than 100% above board. And finally NJ engaged in arbitrage, they issues bonds at 7%+ under the brilliant notion that they could do better than 7% in the equity markets.
4) This is a bi-partisan clusterfug. NJ keeps blowing out their governors but they all make the same mistakes because the voters there like everywhere else do not want to face up to the tough choices and realities.
From Fortune:
"...In 1990 the country was hit by a recession, and the new Democratic governor, James Florio, responded with a wildly unpopular $2.8 billion income and sales tax increase to balance the budget. Two years later, facing another budget shortfall, he turned to the state pension system for help. With almost unanimous support in the legislature, he pushed through the Pension Revaluation Act of 1992.
We'll spare you the minutiae of pension accounting and just say that the law permitted the state to recognize investment gains in the fund more quickly than under previous rules. It also lifted the projected rate of return on the fund's investments to 8.75% from 7% (since lowered to 8.25%). These "adjustments" had a big impact: According to an official Benefits Review Task Force report published in 2005, they allowed the state to cut its pension contributions by more than $1.5 billion in 1992 and 1993.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman, running on a tax-cutting platform, defeated Florio in the 1993 governor's race. To help pay for her promised tax cuts, Whitman, like her predecessor, turned to the pension fund. In 1994, at her urging, the legislature adopted another pension "reform" act that allowed her to reduce state and local contributions to the plan by nearly $1.5 billion in 1994 and 1995, according to the task force report. Florio's and Whitman's accounting changes were "the one-two punch from which the retirement system has never recovered," says Douglas Forrester, who was the assistant state treasurer under Kean.
...Seeking to make up lost ground without putting up more money, the state's leaders looked to the magic of the stock market. In 1997 New Jersey sold $2.75 billion of bonds paying 7.6% interest, putting the proceeds into the pension fund to be invested for higher returns.
At that time Whitman said the ironically named Pension Security Plan would save taxpayers about $45 billion. It hasn't worked out that way. The fund has earned less than 6% annually since the bonds were issued.
...Today New Jersey seems locked in a downward spiral. "New Jersey and many other systems have negative cash flows, meaning that contributions are less than the benefits we pay out," says William Clark, director of the New Jersey Division of Investment, which manages the pension fund. "You can't make your money back when it's flowing out of the system
...Corzine has also imposed reduced benefits on state workers. Since 2007 he has raised the retirement age to 62, increased the salary requirement for pension eligibility, increased employee contributions, and capped pension income. But unions are fighting his request that members take unpaid furloughs and give up some or all of the wage hikes they are due.
"We believe reopening contracts should be a last resort as we seek to find other ways to free up money," says Anthony Miskowski, secretary of CWA Local 1033. "If we budge on the contracts, the unions are dead." But after a pause, he acknowledges that something has to give: "We'll be forced someday to be more flexible."
And those are baby steps compared with the sweeping measures recommended by consultants like Deloitte for all states facing pension crises. They include reducing benefits for current and future employees, pegging cost-of-living increases to actual inflation, cutting early-retirement programs, and forcing the states to stick with adequate funding plans. That's more of a wish list than a practical plan of action. "These are all politically sensitive solutions," says Deloitte's Weiss. "The unions are screaming, but states have to stop the bleeding..."
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/benner_pension.fortune/index.htm
1) Over-promising employees- this piece cannot be overemphasized. State and local governments bought electoral peace during stronger economic times by dishing out benefits which are unsustainable. This goes to heart of our demographic mess. It is easy to promise future benefits when you have a relatively young worker to retiree ratio, but when those ratios shift down all hell breaks loose fiscally. Government workers and their dependents are a significant electoral force. They always have been but when the demographics were more favorable pandering to this constituency (Daley machine!!!) was less harmful, now it is unsustainable. Keep in mind these are not only featherbedding parking attendents and street sweepers, this group includes prison guards, firemen, police, teachers etc. Who wants to vote against teachers, prisons, police and fire trucks? Well you might want to think about it.
2) Underfunding the pensions to begin with- NJ shows how policy decisions years ago create landmines decades into the future. NJ in mid and late 1990's started systematically under-funding their pensions via accounting tricks. The bag of tricks is just about empty.
3) Over-reliance on market returns- pension managers bought into the same BS, individuals did about the equity markets going up double digits into eternity. Hence, they shifted increasing amounts of the fund into equities frequently right into the teeth of bear markets. On top of this I suspect the arrangements by which many pension managers pushed funds to particular investment houses were less than 100% above board. And finally NJ engaged in arbitrage, they issues bonds at 7%+ under the brilliant notion that they could do better than 7% in the equity markets.
4) This is a bi-partisan clusterfug. NJ keeps blowing out their governors but they all make the same mistakes because the voters there like everywhere else do not want to face up to the tough choices and realities.
From Fortune:
"...In 1990 the country was hit by a recession, and the new Democratic governor, James Florio, responded with a wildly unpopular $2.8 billion income and sales tax increase to balance the budget. Two years later, facing another budget shortfall, he turned to the state pension system for help. With almost unanimous support in the legislature, he pushed through the Pension Revaluation Act of 1992.
We'll spare you the minutiae of pension accounting and just say that the law permitted the state to recognize investment gains in the fund more quickly than under previous rules. It also lifted the projected rate of return on the fund's investments to 8.75% from 7% (since lowered to 8.25%). These "adjustments" had a big impact: According to an official Benefits Review Task Force report published in 2005, they allowed the state to cut its pension contributions by more than $1.5 billion in 1992 and 1993.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman, running on a tax-cutting platform, defeated Florio in the 1993 governor's race. To help pay for her promised tax cuts, Whitman, like her predecessor, turned to the pension fund. In 1994, at her urging, the legislature adopted another pension "reform" act that allowed her to reduce state and local contributions to the plan by nearly $1.5 billion in 1994 and 1995, according to the task force report. Florio's and Whitman's accounting changes were "the one-two punch from which the retirement system has never recovered," says Douglas Forrester, who was the assistant state treasurer under Kean.
...Seeking to make up lost ground without putting up more money, the state's leaders looked to the magic of the stock market. In 1997 New Jersey sold $2.75 billion of bonds paying 7.6% interest, putting the proceeds into the pension fund to be invested for higher returns.
At that time Whitman said the ironically named Pension Security Plan would save taxpayers about $45 billion. It hasn't worked out that way. The fund has earned less than 6% annually since the bonds were issued.
...Today New Jersey seems locked in a downward spiral. "New Jersey and many other systems have negative cash flows, meaning that contributions are less than the benefits we pay out," says William Clark, director of the New Jersey Division of Investment, which manages the pension fund. "You can't make your money back when it's flowing out of the system
...Corzine has also imposed reduced benefits on state workers. Since 2007 he has raised the retirement age to 62, increased the salary requirement for pension eligibility, increased employee contributions, and capped pension income. But unions are fighting his request that members take unpaid furloughs and give up some or all of the wage hikes they are due.
"We believe reopening contracts should be a last resort as we seek to find other ways to free up money," says Anthony Miskowski, secretary of CWA Local 1033. "If we budge on the contracts, the unions are dead." But after a pause, he acknowledges that something has to give: "We'll be forced someday to be more flexible."
And those are baby steps compared with the sweeping measures recommended by consultants like Deloitte for all states facing pension crises. They include reducing benefits for current and future employees, pegging cost-of-living increases to actual inflation, cutting early-retirement programs, and forcing the states to stick with adequate funding plans. That's more of a wish list than a practical plan of action. "These are all politically sensitive solutions," says Deloitte's Weiss. "The unions are screaming, but states have to stop the bleeding..."
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/benner_pension.fortune/index.htm
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